I started this blog to write about family cows.  And it has turned out I write mostly about manure.  No Shit!  Still working on the smooth family cow thing.  New readers will have to go back to the beginning and see how that has turned out the last 4 years.  Jane will write that next chapter.

I have a hard time defining what I think is more important about my baker’s dozen flock of chickens.  The eggs or the manure?  If it’s breakfast time, I would say the eggs, but if I am in the garden, I would say the manure.

Night soil from the flock.

My chickens are housed in a small greenhouse.  A morphed approach to having fresh eggs and ratcheting down from a large pastured egg operation.  We always wintered our hens in hoophouses to keep them off the pasture during the winter months, for predator protection and to gather more bedding for fertilizing purposes.

Daily chores with my hens consist of feeding, checking water, gathering eggs, and building up the deep bedding pack.

The bedding really builds up over time.  What a resource at all our finger tips, if we would just not be so tight with bedding.  And with chickens, they do the work of turning it and breaking it down for us.  No machinery, no stinky chicken houses to clean because we have added carbon and lots of it.

Every day I at least cover up the night soil area where the flock sleeps.  Weekly I bed the whole she-bang, replenish the nest boxes with new straw, and sit back and watch the chickens dig through the straw for tidbits of grain that escaped the combine.

Closed up for the night.

The greenhouse floor is soil, the  ground is damp around the edges, and earth worms migrate in from the outside to the rich manure pack, and provide treats for hens.  It’s a great system, the hens are safe, warm and dry, and I get copious amounts of light, easy-to-move deep bedding for my gardens.

Hen pecked deep bedding.

Can’t beat that!

I pretty much know now what works in the winter garden and what doesn’t.  Red cabbage is one of the toughies.  With fall root pruning it holds in the winter garden during our cold snaps.  But remember, we’re in the maritime Northwest, so it doesn’t get all that cold.  Our lowest reading this winter has been 19°F.  Just mostly wet and raw.  I do have to say, though that my green cabbages that I left in the garden (except January King) have succumbed to our light freezes.  The red cabbage is right there next to the rotten cabbage heads, and it’s plugging away in its holding pattern.  My goal with our winter food supply is to keep it simple.  A minimum of care and purchased materials, just harvesting is my goal.

The root supply was getting low, first with snow, and then the rain, I hadn’t dug any roots for two weeks.  I was robbing roots out of Jane’s buckets.

Wha…?

The dirty secret of row run is probably a surprise to new gardeners who are used to buying vegetables at the store or farmers market.  It’s not all perfect.  My vegetable harvest each week is a culmination of all the choices I have made with my garden.   Besides being the produce manager, I am the grower too.  I see all the defects in my vegetables and my judgement.  Did I plant the right variety, at the right time?  Did I feed and weed timely?  Did I protect the crops from freezing or did I shrug at the weather reports?  Did I plant enough for the vole and mine?  All the questions get answered each week as the winter harvest calendar marches us right up to spring planting.

We have ready-made root cellar conditions here for root crops that like high humidity and refrigerator temperatures.  Basically the garden is a refrigerator without the electric bill.  There is another bill, though, that of varmints and the elements.  Clockwise, starting at the rutabaga with its haired over slug bites from summer; celeriac with vole damage; parsnip with canker; carrot with a split jacket; beet with vole damage, and lastly a carrot with vole damage.  All of these have edible parts, but will probably end up in Jane’s bucket. Voles are an ongoing problem, that are somewhat under control.  The slugs are the same.  There isn’t or shouldn’t be a garden anywhere with no pests, that’s just part of living in a biological world.  The canker on the parsnip could be avoided with choosing a canker resistant variety.  And the split carrot is the result of leaving a summer carrot variety in the ground after the fall rains have started.  There is no waste, damaged vegetables can go to Jane, or could be trimmed for house use if we were short.

The final list for harvest yesterday was:  carrots, parsnips, celeriac, rutabaga, giant kohlrabi, rutabaga, beets, and cabbage.  Lots of fodder for house and cow.

The snow was only up to the label on my Muck boots, but it was wet and slick.  I just had to sneak over the hill a tad and the rest was history.  I was committed.  Luckily I know when to quit trying…

Of course, the cows have to come and watch too, and smirk.

We really lucked out, we topped out at 20″ of snow and by 3 am Wednesday it started to rain, no Columbia Gorge ice, it is forming east and north of here.  We are just getting rain, and our 20″ of snow is now about 3″ of slush.  All that rain combined with snow melt mean trouble downstream from us.  Our power was only out for a day and half and we consider a few broken fruit trees and one mildly stuck pickup pretty good for a storm system this size.  Others have not been so fortunate.

A good day for baking.  Parsnip cake sounded good, and I’m sure Jane won’t miss a snip or two.

I saved this recipe from the newspaper last winter, and never did anything with it until this winter when Hangdog needed a dessert for his Christmas potluck at work.  I’m posting the recipe directly from the article.  I simplified it by substituting all-purpose flour for almond flour, mixing it with a spoon (no stand mixer here), and I baked it in a 9 x 13 pan.  The cake was sweet enough without frosting, so I left that part out too.  The stripped down cake is delicious, but I have no doubt if you followed the recipe exactly it just might be stupendous   Here is the original article as it appeared in The Oregonian.

PARSNIP CAKE

Makes one 9-inch cake

The other day I was looking at the roasted chicken I had in the fridge, and thinking, “Gee, should I climb out of the chicken enchilada rut and  make something else?”  When you know your way around cooking, a recipe is but a suggestion for some dishes.  I was hankering for some comfort food myself, and the tuna casserole with celery, cream of mushroom soup and chinese noodles came to mind.  I rummaged through my mom’s grange cookbooks and pulled out the Meat edition from 1968.  These grange cookbooks have never let me down for  home cooking.  All the recipes are from grange women who were serious cooks, some recipes are old, some new-fangled, well, at least for the 60′s, and I love the contributors name and grange posted at the bottom of each recipe.  What I was wanting was a taste of nostalgia and some seasoning ideas, I wasn’t really interested in a tuna casserole, since  I don’t have tuna, celery or commercial soup in my pantry, but I did have some crispy Chinese noodles.  I’m weak, I admit it   And I had frozen sautéed chanterelles, celery root with crunchy tops, and the makings of a good béchamel, I figured the chicken could certainly stand in for Charlie.

I think I realized when I opened up the cookbook and a recipe written in my mom’s hand fell out, that the comfort of comfort foods stems from the memories of a meal and the cook as much as the meal itself.  My mom’s recipe had no title and was written how a scratch cook writes up a recipe.  Just ingredients with a few side notes.  Cut up 4# rabbit, 4 onions, 1/3 c vinegar, pickling spice, basil, sauterne wine, flour, butter, parsnips, carrots.  Place rabbit pieces in bowl with first four ingredients, add enuf water.  Marinate 2 days.  Dry rabbit, dredge, brown, arrange vegetables in bottom of dish, add rabbit, and 6 T of marinade.  Bake in slow oven.  Marie

I used to raise rabbits for 4-H and we ate this often in the winter when the parsnips were plentiful.  I never saw her with a recipe, and reading this I can see it came from the local Guernsey breeder, Marie.

I don’t know about you, but when I see a handwritten recipe, it has meaning beyond more than just a list of ingredients and the instructions to go with the list.  I quickly dug out my bunch of recipes that I keep separate.  It’s not because I use them frequently, but more because they are mostly handwritten recipes that have been given to me.  A gift.  A gift in this day of cursors, email and Epicurious.  I love Simply Recipes and other recipe sites in that they give me inspiration, but it’s not the same.  They don’t call it your signature for nothing, IT IS a person’s whole being that I see when I look at their handwriting.  I see our friendship, their skills and life leanings, I see relationships and I remember them instantly when I see the script.  Is cursive dead?  I hope not.

Looking through my recipe gifts, I see my neighbor who shared her granola recipe from the Shaker school in Ohio, she missed home,  the recipe was a connection after moving to west to Oregon with her husband.

I see a newly minted farming friend who shared a chicken recipe with me, she later was murdered on her farm by her own child.  We knew we were going to be fast friends when the first things she asked on a farm visit were, “Where is your milk cow?”  “Do you quilt?”

Some people have passed on in a more normal way, Mary my staunch, and sometimes silly neighbor gave me her roll recipe.  She and her husband performed the marches at Grange meetings in a way that made you want to march alongside.  She shared that being the oldest daughter in a large farm family at the turn of the century meant you always had to cook, clean and tend to the youngers.  My girlfriend and I would ride horseback to her house and snag a roll, and she would be wistful remembering wanting to ride the plow horses to the fields like her little sisters did.  One of the original blue hairs, I never saw her in slacks – ever.  Always a dress and an apron, something on the cookstove, and a quilt in the frame.

Some people just pass out of your life too, a co-worker doled out her French Dressing recipe sparingly.  I was glad to be a recipient.  She was Mormon and worked in the cafeteria, and she saved gallon jars and containers for me – which always brought on curious looks from those around us.  We both spoke pantry, it may as well have been a foreign language.

And there are recipes from the current people in my life too.  A Kahlua recipe from Hangdog written in his distinctive hand.  And my go to roll recipe from a friend I see only occasionally when we buy straw.  It’s not my roll recipe, it is Joan’s Rolls and I use it for everything roll related, and we all remember visits with Joan and her family when I use this recipe.

Cooking is a blend of old and new, tried and true, and spans decades of experience in each recipe that is passed down or shared with friends.  The tips each cook imparts is the passing of the torch so to speak that spans time and connects us all.  And I know even the ladies from another time would have been glad to have the world of recipes at their finger tips if that had been available to them.  I like the internet too, but I love my handwritten recipes, they are comforting.

Not so cold though that the ice is hard to break on the troughs.  Usually I put a limb in the troughs and that is enough to keep the ice from forming so thick the cows can’t break it.  It hasn’t got cold enough for me to go hunt down the trough limbs…so I just break the ice in the morning if the cows haven’t yet.

I’m being lazy and still feeding outside.  It’s easy and the cows don’t mind, they get more freedom than when they are confined to the feeding shed/sacrifice area.  I will still have enough time to gather ample bedding for composting, and I have to interject here, we don’t really have pugging problems even if the cows stayed out all winter.

A couple of things on our side with outside feeding besides the non-pugging are:

♥  We live just out of the zone that receives the ubiquitous and I might say famous Columbia Gorge east wind, so the temperature reading is the temperature reading.

♥  We also have no babies born at this time, just so we aren’t subjecting birthing mothers or newborns to harsh weather.  Much easier on them and us – basically no worries.  This one factor really harks back to the SCAT post, going against nature is a major attitude problem.  Animals in the wild don’t normally have babies in the winter, unless it is the poor mustangs subjected to our “birth control” experiments.

Driver’s view.

Feeding outside means bringing the hay to them.  Downside – I’m using fuel, but it takes fuel too, to clean the feeding shed come spring.  Upside – I’m getting some nutrient cycling going via hay that doesn’t get eaten along with manure and urine supplied by the cows.

More driver’s view.

Feeder’s view.

I think flexibility is the key.  Planning chore management should include flexibility.  This is a simple way to feed and with a small herd can be done with a wheelbarrow if need be.  Building flexibility or resilience into your operation is a must.  We plan our calving for late spring, we make small square bales so anyone can handle them without equipment, and we go with the flow.  If the weather really turns I can put the cows in, if it stays mild a while longer I can still fall back on old outside feeding habits and enjoy the break.

The sky shows morning and evening have been amazing.

Wolf Moonrise from Chanticleer Point.

Red Cored Chantenay carrot, Brilliant cand Superschmelz kohlrabi

I really like cabbage slaw which I posted about here.  But winter time is different.  Most of my green cabbage has been committed to the kraut crocks and we like red cabbage cooked like this.  But the root crops are abundant this time and year and taste very good made into slaw.

It doesn’t have to be complicated; a simple box grater, a few roots and your favorite vinaigrette  and you have the makings for a side dish, or meal.

I used cider vinegar, olive oil and a little honey for my dressing.  Topped with a few dried cranberries and it’s good enough for dessert!

Have root vegetables made their way to your table?  How do you prepare them?

One of our goals/wishes is to grow most of our own food.  To make that task seem a little less daunting, we have certain criteria that we subject potential foods to before they qualify as homestead keepers for us.  Our mix of vegetables that we grow are made up from varieties that my gardening mentors passed on to me, vegetables that allow us to be lazy gardeners, and vegetables we like to eat.  I would have to say Sweet Meat winter squash meets the provenance, lazy gardener, and tasty criteria all in one fell swoop.  I’ve grown it for years from seed I was gifted with, Hangdog and I met at a business built on the old Gill Brothers nursery site (Gill originated Sweet Meat.)  And I like a winter squash that stores until the next summer with a minimum of fussing, not to mention it tastes good.  I take care of the squash during the growing season and it feeds me all winter – it is a vitamin rich winter staple for us, to the tune of 400 – 500 pounds a year.

Sweet Meat Cucurbita maxima enjoyed by a vole.

Sweet Meat is a tough customer.  As you can see the voles wanted the seeds, but didn’t chew through the thick flesh.  They did get a couple of squashes though, so I harvested these and set them to cure.  No point in feeding the wildlife that much.  The damaged squash has been fine in storage, but I am using these first, just in case.  Winter squash of the right variety can really be a survival food, once they are grown (if you are able to grow squash in your area) and harvested, they store very well.  As a general rule, C. pepo doesn’t store too long, that’s acorn, pumpkins, etc., although Delicata seems to keep fairly long.  I just don’t bother with them because they are so small.  C. maxima stores well, that is your Hubbard type squash, some are large and some are small, like Red Kuri.  C. moschata keeps very well too, but in my area the butternuts, as much as I like to eat them, don’t put on a reliable crop.  So Cucurbita maxima is the one for my garden and pantry.

When your saving your own seeds you can afford to pay attention to detail.  Besides evaluating the squash from germination to harvest, I save seeds from individual squashes that keep well, and taste good.  The squash are good at first harvest too, but they do sweeten in storage and there is a noticeable difference between specimens.

Since the squash keep so well, I only cook as needed, no need to process and freeze or can these for a later use.  I don’t have time in the fall anyway and they don’t need it.  In September I fed the squash we didn’t eat to the laying hens.  That’s a keeper in my book.

So each week as I cook a squash, I pull out the seeds to dry, and if the squash tastes good I commit the air-dried seeds to the seed bank.  I guess that isn’t really true, they all taste good, some just taste better than others.  And all the seeds taste good too, some are just better candidates for planting on.

I just finished harvesting seeds of the naked seed pumpkins.  It’s one of those jobs that takes just a few days, but that I think about all year.  I’m posting about the why of that over at Simple-Green-Frugal Co-op today.  See you there!